


Disappearing Act

by vials



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Skyfall, and how much they're suffering basically, mentions of others too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 06:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8879362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Considering semi-recent events, Eve isn't surprised to find James sulking in his flat. But she's not quite prepared for anything after that.





	

It wasn’t the first time that Eve had seen someone so messily drunk, but it was the first time that person had been James Bond. She regarded that fact as rather strange, considering the amount the man drank was no secret, but she had come to accept that he could hold his alcohol and sometimes even wondered if he was capable of getting drunk. She supposed she now had the answer to her question.

“James,” she sighed, exasperated, when the man continued to remain silent on her question. “How much have you had to drink? I’m only asking this one more time, and then I’m going to assume it’s ‘too much’ and call an ambulance.”

For a second, she thought James almost looked betrayed. He quickly hid it back beneath his mask of impassiveness; one that slipped increasingly often when he was actually drunk, Eve noticed.

“No more than usual,” he said, and surprisingly his words didn’t slur. “Perhaps should have had a little more to eat beforehand, that’s all.”

Eve fought the urge to sigh again. “I know that’s a lie, but I’ll give you a second chance considering you did finally answer the question.”

“It’s fine, Eve,” James said, and he looked as though he had begun an attempt to wave a hand casually but realised he didn’t have the strength to lift it. It twitched at his side instead, before his fingers curled slightly against the sofa cushions. 

“It doesn’t look fine,” Eve told him, finally moving from where she had been leaning against the kitchen doorframe. Behind her, the kitchen was disorganised but clean, though Eve got the impression that was because James had been living on takeaways and eating them right out of the packaging. “James –”

“If this is going to be a speech about how you’re worried about me, I really don’t need to hear it,” James said, and there was a bite of nastiness in his words that Eve couldn’t ignore. She raised an eyebrow, allowing herself to feel briefly affronted, before carrying on regardless.

“Well, I am worried about you,” she said, shrugging. “But I was actually preparing a speech about responsibilities, if you wanted to hear that one instead.”

“Not really.”

“Tough.”

They looked at one another, James glaring, Eve watching him back evenly.

“You haven’t showed up to work in over a week,” she said simply. “Which is… quite frankly unacceptable, but whatever, you do this sometimes. However, you’re usually skipping work because you’ve decided you’ve got something more exciting to do than fill out report forms, and I’m sorry, but this doesn’t exactly fit the bill.”

“I’ve been taking some time off,” James said bluntly. “Isn’t that encouraged, after such stressful assignments?”

“Yes,” Eve admitted. “But the Skyfall nonsense was wrapped up months ago. You had your leave offered then, and you said no. If you decided you wanted it after all, you could have at least called.”

“Well, consider this me calling.”

“Wonderful. I suppose I’m your personal assistant now, too?”

“I can’t say I’d mind.”

“Save it,” Eve told him warningly. “Now is not the time for your incessant flirting, James. You know what kind of trouble this disappearing act causes at work? It’s a security issue.”

“Like you don’t know where I am.”

“We know where you _are_ , but that still doesn’t explain why you’re vanishing. No one’s pleased, least of all M.”

“I’m sure Mallory can get over it,” James said, and Eve noted the deliberate use of the man’s surname, the curl of bitterness to James’s lip when he said it. She slumped her shoulders, feeling a sudden rush of sympathy for him through her annoyance.

“I know it’s an adjustment,” she said, keeping her voice firm even if her tone was gentle. “But you can’t call him by his name anymore. You know that.”

James gave a grunt, which Eve supposed was the best acknowledgement she was going to get.

“You’re not replacing her, James,” Eve said, quietly.

James looked at her properly then, his eyes suddenly intensely focused, and if Eve didn’t work where she worked she would have probably run for the hills. She had been on the wrong end of many a glare from a seething double-0 and she had learned to not so much as blink; even so, the intensity of James’s gaze was disconcerting. 

“If it’s not replacing her, what is it?” he snapped. “She’s dead. Of course she’s been replaced. We can’t dress it up as anything else, can we?”

“I know that,” Eve said. “You know I wasn’t trying to dress it up. I meant she’s always going to be M to you. The current M will always be someone separate from that. That’s understandable – I’m sure it’s going to be the same with anyone who’s worked with her for years. But you’re just following the rules. Just because you call him M doesn’t mean you’re not still loyal to her. Anyone with half a brain can tell that you’re hers, through and through.”

Briefly, something softened in James’s gaze; something that could have been relief. It didn’t last long, quickly being clouded over by everything else, but Eve supposed it was a start.

“Well, I cocked that up, didn’t I?” James said, and perhaps the worst part of it all was the fact that Eve heard a distinct crack in his voice as he did so.

“James,” she said, half sympathetically, half warningly. “Don’t go down that road.”

“Bit late for that.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” James demanded, unnecessarily defensive.

“The drinking?” she asked. “The skipping work? Obviously you’ve gone down the route of blaming yourself for her death.”

“Whose bloody fault was it, then?”

“If I had to take one guess, I would say Silva,” Eve said, shrugging again. “But if we wanted to play this game, you’re not the only one who had a role. If you’re so desperate to take responsibility for it, at least share it with others who are feeling the same way. There’s a lot of us cut up about it at work, James. It isn’t just you. Maybe you would benefit from being around people who understand; maybe you wouldn’t. But do everyone a favour and try not to make this all about you. We’re here to support you, not to worry about you and run around trying to find out where you are.”

She hadn’t meant the words to sound so harsh, but she didn’t regret the fact that they did. It was difficult to feel too bad for it, when she thought about what she saw at work every day. Tanner was lost, having taken some leave and come back to help with the changeover, with shadows under his eyes and the atmosphere around him deflated. Q had been a wreck, too, and still was if his stress levels reached the point where he couldn’t ignore it anymore; only the other day Eve had seen him freak out at an intern for not isolating the system before doing a routine check on it, as though it could spring a virus on them just like before. This fact had quickly been realised, but it hadn’t ridded Q’s shoulders of the tension that they had held all day, and being mistaken hadn’t been the thing that had put tears in his eyes as he’d apologised to the intern and excused himself for a moment.

Eve thought they would both love to hide at home and drink, but unfortunately there were jobs to be done. 

“You know where I am now,” James said shortly, probably because he knew he was wrong. “Tell them, and send them my apologies.”

“Bloody well do it yourself,” Eve snapped. “None of us have time for this, James.”

“I’m not asking you to have time for it,” James said, equally as short. “I’m staying out of your way. No one asked you to come here, no one asked for everyone to demand I follow the exact bloody protocol, even when you know exactly where I am. I’m not tasked to anything at the moment, there’s no reason I have to be at work apart from some bloody pencil-pushing bureaucracy that M is so fond of. I’m staying at home and I’m minding my own business. Use your bloody imagination if I’m not answering the phone. It’s hardly a wonderful time right now, is it?”

Eve sighed, wanting to argue with him but knowing that if he hadn’t listened to her the first time, he probably wouldn’t if she repeated herself for a second time. She knew James well enough to know that he was hardly the type who would benefit from one on one chats about his feelings, and she had accepted that, despite her urges telling her to try anyway. But god, she wished he would work on the tunnel vision. 

“I know it isn’t,” she said, forcing herself to be patient. “And I never denied that for a moment. I’m sure this is an awful time. I was just asking you to be mindful of the fact that it’s an awful time for people who aren’t you, too, so a little bit of transparency would be appreciated.”

“She _died in my arms_!” James said, suddenly, loudly, bordering on shouting. “She died in my arms and you’re trying to tell me that I’m not more to blame for this than anyone else? Q made a simple mistake, one that anyone could have made, and it wasn’t even his bloody fault seems what Silva did was meant to be impossible. How could he had known? And Tanner – all Tanner did wrong was not physically drag her from the inquiry when we told him Silva had escaped, and who can blame him for not trying that? She’d have ripped his balls off. Even Mallory managed to take a bullet for her. And what about me?”

It was an odd sight to behold; James’s eyes still so intense, his face twisted with anger and grief as he leaned forward slightly, though the rest of his body still looked physically weighed down. Eve thought he would be pacing if he could, but she supposed his strength didn’t quite carry that far.

“She trusted me,” James said, and Eve heard that catch in his voice again. “She trusted me to hide her, and she trusted me to be able to cope if – _when_ – we were found. The whole bloody thing was my idea, the whole go off the grid plan. It was the only thing I could think of, even if I knew the risks. If we were off the grid, then we’d be on our own when he caught up. I thought we’d be able to deal with it. I thought I’d pull something out of my arse, same as I always do. I guess I forgot that somebody always bloody dies when I do that.” He paused, before snorting humourlessly. “I just figured it would be me this time.”

For several moments, Eve didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t been told the details, of course. All she knew was that there had been a confrontation, and at the end of it, both Silva and M had been dead. She knew M had been shot, though she didn’t know by who. She knew James had killed Silva, but she didn’t know how. She had no idea of the rest of the details. She could infer from news reports that there had been some kind of explosion, though MI6 had easily covered that up by claiming it was a military exercise that had gone horribly wrong. She had put other small pieces together, too, quietly and without trying to confirm them. But there had been nothing to hint that James had seen her die, and certainly not that she had died in his arms. 

She stared at James, at a loss.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said, and she shook her head.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry, James.”

“No, you’re probably right,” James said, slumping back against the sofa. “I’m sure everyone else is having this argument with themselves. I know it’s at least partially irrational. I’ve been through it enough. But I have to take some responsibility. She might have made it, if we’d been closer to civilisation. Or she might not have been shot in the first place, if I had done things differently.” He gave a thin smile. “I wish I’d just shot that bastard when I had the chance. Back on the island, or on the flight over. She wanted me to bring him back so she could find out what the attacker’s motivations were for stealing the harddrive, but I had a feeling about him. I guess it’s called recognising your own, and he was very fond of pointing out that we were the same type. I thought to myself that it would have been better to shoot him, but I didn’t.”

“Just as well, really,” Eve said. “You can’t shoot someone who’s in MI6 custody, James. You would have been thrown in prison for that.”

“Probably,” James admitted. “But I think it would have been worth it. Ah well, no matter. That isn’t what happened, is it? She’s dead, and so is he, and he got what he wanted. He won.”

“He did,” Eve said quietly, because there was no getting around that fact and she respected James too much to lie to him. “Sometimes they do, James,” she added, and James nodded, all of the fight gone out of him.

“They win more often than most people realise.”

“You know that all too well, don’t you?” Eve asked, and James gave a humourless smile.

“So perhaps, with that in mind,” he said, before raising an eyebrow in a gesture that was a little more like the James she remembered, “leave an old man to his drink?”

“You’re an old man now, are you?” she asked, amused, and when James laughed it still didn’t quite sound genuine, but it was at least an effort. Eve didn’t miss the way the smile failed to reach his eyes, or the emptiness just under the laugh. She tried to direct her attention away from the tightness she could hear in his voice, too, but it was difficult when the whole thing was so alien.

He wasn’t looking at her anymore, and there really was nothing she could say. She took a tentative step forward, reaching out and gently touching his hand. 

“I am sorry,” she said, quietly, afraid to speak any louder in case she heard the same break in her own voice. “For everything. I know it doesn’t mean much, but I am so very sorry.”

James looked at her, held her gaze as a way to acknowledge what she’d said, but when he didn’t reply she gave him a small smile and patted his hand, moving for the door. She hadn’t got more than a step when she felt him catch hold of her sleeve, and when she looked back she was surprised to see that his eyes looked damp.

“Don’t go,” he said, quietly, and he sounded so broken that Eve thought she might have been hearing things. 

“James –”

“I love you,” he said, and Eve reached over, gently uncurling his fingers from her sleeve.

“I think you would love anyone tonight, if it meant you didn’t have to be alone,” she said.

James didn’t deny it, but she didn’t leave, either.


End file.
